Samantha Power

Samantha Power is the Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Power moved to the United States from her native Ireland in 1979, and she attended Yale University and Harvard Law School. She was a journalist for US News and World Report and The Economist, for whom she covered the war in Yugoslavia from 1993 to 1996. In 1996 she joined the International Crisis Group (ICG) as a political analyst, helping launch the organization in Bosnia. She edited, with Graham Allison, Realizing Human Rights and has recently published A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Samantha Power lives in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

A Problem From Hell (the title is taken
from Warren Christopher’s characterization of the Bosnian crisis
in the mid 1990’s) is a scholarly analysis of America’s policy towards
genocide in the 20th century. In a compelling and engaging narrative,
Samantha Power traces the United States’ policy toward genocide:
the Turk’s slaughter of the Armenians in 1915, the Holocaust, Cambodia,
Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds, the ethnic cleansings of Yugoslavia
and the Hutus genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda…Suffice it to say,
this is a very important book. That fact, however, shouldn’t discourage
anyone from reading it.

Robert Birnbaum:
You went to law school with the intention of doing what?

Samantha Power: Not with a terribly precise
intention. I thought I would either go into government or go prosecute
the bad guys at the Hague.

RB: So you always had an interest in going
after the “bad guys”?

SP: I went to Bosnia first. I was a war correspondent
first.

RB: You went to Yale

We have a foreign policy based on our amoral economic interests
run by amateurs who want to stand for somethinghence
the agonybut ultimately dont want to exercise
any leadership that has a cost They say there may be
as many as a million massacred in Rwanda…The militias continue
to slay the innocent and the educated Has it really cost
the US nothing?

-from the journal of a US official (A Problem
From Hell, p. 385)

SP: then I worked
in Washington, D.C., for a year, for the Carnegie Endowment for
Peace. I worked on Bosnia almost full time. And then I moved to
Bosnia and was there for a couple of yearsand then I went
to law school just as the war ended in ’95. And then I went back
and forth to Bosnia through ’95 and ’96. Then I got the idea for
the book.

RB: What drew you to the war in Bosnia?

SP: It was nothing about the warnothing
about war as such. It was just that war, at that time. When I was
in Washington, the person I worked for, Morton Abramowitz, was very
concerned about what was going on there. As his assistant I had
to learn the facts of the matter. The easy thingwhich I have
done for most of my lifeis to block the facts out. Once you
are in a position where you have to process the facts, you are stuck.
It was so incredibly unjust, what was going on. And absurd, in my
viewat the time, a very young viewthat we were doing
so little to stop the atrocities. The only skill I had was that
of being able to writejust to go and be a reporter.

RB: At that time were you privy to any information
that was not easily available to other people?

SP: In Washington? No.

RB: What I am trying to get at was that the
information about Bosnia was available to anyone.

SP: Oh yes, yes, yes. It helped that I was
tasked to process it. Before I went to work for Abramowitz the information
was available to me and I ignored it. Knowledge is something you
can possess on a continuum. I had in the abstract at one point and
then it became very deeply personal to me, by virtue of working
for him. But yes, it was all over the papers, the concentration
camps, the murdering of civilians and so on.

RB: After Bosnia you went to law school with
the intention of remedying, in some way, some of the things you
knew about. In A Problem for Hell, you say that you have
interviewed 300 people from ’93 to 2000. Did you know in ’93 that
you were going to write a book?

SP: No. I did many more than 300 interviews.
That number is just for U.S. officials. Once I decided to do a book
in ’96, I was able to draw on all the interviews I had done. U.S.
policy vis-a-vis the former Yugoslavia was always of deep
interest to me because I was covering it as a journalist. So there
was some segment of interviews that I had conducted in the ’93 to
’96 period, when I was a journalist , that I was able to go back
through. And indeed the Srebrenica story in particular, the way
that I tell it in the book is very much born of my experience on
the ground in ’95. It’s a case of retrospectively seeing meaning
in what I had already covered.

RB: How did you decide to do a book on genocide?

SP: It’s not a book on genocide. It’s a book
on American

RB: policy. But one can’t avoid the
tall shadows of the episodes of mass murder.

SP: At no point was the occurrence of genocide
the peculiar part. For me, that’s going to be with us for a long
time. It’s been with us for a long time. That doesn’t mean we should
accept it. But that wasn’t a puzzle. The puzzle was the American
response to it [genocide]. I came back to this country in ’95 and
was struck by the Holocaust culture. It had been growingI
later learnedfrom the late 70s forward. The first five
years of the 1990’s there were more NY Times and Washington
Post news stories in that five-year period than there had been
in the previous 45 years combined about the Holocaust.

RB: When was Thomas Kenneally’s Schindler’s
List published?

"’Never
again’ might best be defined as ‘Never again would Germans
kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.’"
-DAVID RIEFF

SP: It didn’t become
a bestseller until the movie in 1993. The Holocaust Museum opened
in ’93. That was all there when I was living in this country, but
I didn’t notice it in the same way. So I came back and everywhere
it’s “Never again. Never again.” Here at Harvard I was taking a
lot of international relations theory classes and trying to educate
myself on global politics. I was struck that even the realiststhe
people who thought that you should intervene on behalf of America’s
vital interestseveryone made an exception for genocide. So
there was this quasi-public consensus, reflexive though it was,
this intellectual, elite, geopolitical consensus, and yet there
had just been a genocide. So for a class with Stanley on the use
of force, I wanted to see what left the Bosnians out of this universe
of moral obligation or geopolitical consensus. It took me all of
30 seconds to go through my head: So who have we helped? Let’s figure
out what they had that the Bosnians didn’t. The Armenians? The Jews?
The Cambodians? The Kurds? These were the ones I knew about. Burundi?
Rwanda? “Have we ever stopped genocide?” That was how it started,
I did a paper in late ’96, early ’97. I farmed that paper out to
a few people, to Tony [Anthony] Lewis, David Rieff to Marty Peretz
at the New Republic and a couple of other people. They all
said this is a book. The funny thing was that such a book didn’t
exist. I was really surprised that the puzzle of that questionnot
even the puzzlewe say one thing and do another, that’s nothing
new. But just the very fact of genocide, because it was beginning
to really permeate our culture, that we’d focus so much on the genocides
that were out there in the scholarly community but not on this issue
of America [and its policy of non-involvement]. There are so many
books on genocide. That’s why I reacted when you said this book
was on genocide yet there is nothing on this interplay, on by standing.
It seemed like it was worth doing. I thought it would take a year
or two. I’m not sure I would have done it if I had known it would
take this long. But it was worth it.

RB: I understand the thesis of your book,
and I’m sorry to have misstated it. What I wanted to get to was
that you are faced withand I am sure you are not presenting
this as an exhaustive listsix or seven instances in the 20th
century of genocide. Whatever your position is and how the evidence
about policy accretes, you are also dealing with harrowing, horrific,
perhaps incomprehensible facts of slaughter, massacre, rape, torture
and you have to keep reading and being aware of the concrete evidence.
How did that affect you?

SP:
It makes you like baseball. It makes you find your outlets. The
way that it affected me mostthe substance of what I had to
read about, again and againis that it made it all feel very
urgent. The pressure that one would put on oneself anyway, was compounded
exponentially. I just really felt the weight of these stories. The
fact that I was writing about America made it easier because I had
a goal. It was very concrete. I was hoping that the book would service
future victims. It was wildly ambitious, but that was the motivator.
And maybe like a physician for the most part you block out or you
develop this insulated way of processing the gore. But there are
definitely moments when it hits you. I mean very bad moments.

RB: I don’t know if we create an excuse for
people and ourselves, but somehow it becomes understandable that
we create this notion of compassion fatigue to allow for inaction
or by standing. As you exhume the facts from Armenia to Kosovo,
did you become exhausted or desensitized?

SP: It becomes more overwhelming and paralyzing
the more distance you have. I actually think the closer you get,
the more you see it as a discreet set of individuals setting out
to do certain things for their own reasons, and if you are a nerd
like I am, you get into the mechanics of the particular case. It
doesn’t feel like, “Woe is we, woe is the world.” And that’s why
you really have to choose your battles and cases. If I had done
all the genocides, then I wouldn’t have been able to do each case
as carefully as I was able to. I was thinking, this morning, about
how I kept going. One of the virtues of a book like this is that
if I got really depressed or exhausted or bored with a particular
case, I could just drop it. People would ask, “Where are you this
week?” I’d say, “I’m in Rwanda or I’m Kurdistan or Armenia or Turkey.”
So you have your mechanisms, but definitely once you get into it,
especially if you take a character approachboth at individuals
on this side of the ocean and those who are orchestrating the crimes
and even victimsit feels quite manageable and much more discreet
and soluble.

RB: When you say character approach, was
it a deliberate intention of yours to focus on people like Henry
Morganthau, Sr., Raphael Lemkin, Sen. William Proxmire, Rep McCloskey
and Richard Holbrooke?

SP: It didn’t start that way, no. I wish
I had been so smart at the beginning to know that would be the way
to do it. It’s a very inductive book. It’s a very honest bookwhatever
the criticisms it’s going to get or getsin that I went in
with no particular thesis, with just this puzzle and an effort to
understand it. Again and again, I would see these patterns repeating
themselves. It was good I wasn’t getting my Ph.D. so I didn’t have
to set out a whole series of theses up front. So I could actually
just say, “Huh!” People say to me, “I’m surprised that you were
surprised.” Which is a whole other thing. But I went in just to
track what happened in each case, and then to do the reporting and
to understand what was motivating those who were formulating policy
on this side of the ocean. What I was going to do initially, in
the first version of the book as I thought structurally about the
chapters, is have a chapter on these people that I kept encountering,
not a chronological narrative straight through but basically by
theme. One of the themes was going to be dissenters. And then a
Hollywood screenwriter friendI was well over half way into
my researchsaid to me, "Why would you do that?"
At the time I was totally fixated on the structure that I had and
he said, “Why don’t you use these incredible people that you keep
finding and make them the vehicle for telling the story?” Everyone
has those moments, if they are lucky, and I thought, “Oh my god,
you are totally right.” What was great was that I hadn’t gone out
to find them. They just came to me. You couldn’t talk about any
of these issues without learning about these characters.

RB: What is it about these dissenters, that
they can’t stop trying to get the world to pay attention to genocidal
episodes?

The easy thingwhich I have done for most of my lifeis to block the facts out. Once you are in a position where you have to process the facts, you are stuck. It was so incredibly unjust, what was going on. And absurd, in my viewat the time, a very young viewthat we were doing so little to stop the atrocities. The only skill I had was that of being able to writejust to go and be a reporter.

SP: The thing that
unites all of them is that they have had some kind of personal encounter
with evil or its detritus. In the case of Bob Dole, he was briefed
by an Armenian survivor and himself a witness to some Serb thuggery.
In the case of Morganthau, he had been present and on the scene
of the crime. Galbrath saw the destroyed Kurdish villages, Lemkin,
of course, a Holocaust survivor himself, and somebody who had grown
up interested in atrocities before that. Most of them have some
kind of personal connection where they couldn’t look away. My experience
in BosniaI lived in Berlin before I worked in Washingtonthe
[Bosnian] refugees were pouring into Berlin in ’92 and I paid them
virtually no attention. I was overwhelmed or uninterested or I didn’t
know any other war or “what can you do?” By virtue of being put
on it, I had to look. I couldn’t look away. And similarly these
individuals had reasons. There is usually some kind of catalytic
event. I’d say that there were some number of people who looked
and then looked away, but for most people we have a preemptive mechanism
that causes us not to look. So we tell ourselves a story about it
being “a problem from hell” and these people killing each other
for thousands of years and there being nothing we could do. That
is a shield from actually processing the atrocities. In other words,
if you know there is nothing you can do, why look carefully at what’s
going on? It just makes you feel bad. So that’s one thing that unites
them. They have had been forced to look. Either by geographical
proximity, by friends or personal connection. Jesse Helms, who took
a stand on the Kurds, happened to have some Kurdish hunger strikers
demonstrate at his church. The other thing that unites most of them
is that they are people who stand apart from the herd anyway. They
are not “fitter-inners.” They are not people whose lives you look
at and say, “They were company [men] and then woof, they snapped.”
There are exceptions. Some people are company men. Frank McCloskey
[of Indiana] voted more with the Democrats than any representative
in the Congress. But on Bosnia, he thought Clinton’s policy was
untenable, and that was that. He had gone on a Congressional trip
and encountered body parts. But there is a loner’s quality to Galbrath,
Proxmire, Lemkin and even Morganthau, to an extent. He was self-conscious
about being a Jew in the political establishment. There was something
that made them feel a little on the fringe and that both emboldened
them and probably hurt their cause as well.

RB: Are you interested in exploring that
theme further?

SP: I am (chuckles). I was just saying to
a friend of mine that I haven’t had a new idea in such a long time.
I’m going to do something on AIDS in South Africa and Membeke. I’m
going to learn about something that I don’t know anything about.
I think that something that I will always come back to in my writing
is this question that you ask, “What makes these people tick?” I
get into a little bit in the conclusion. What do they have in common
and what do they not have in common? But it’s hard. I don’t remember
the name of the moviebut a Holocaust survivor who is rescued
in a small village in France where they rescued a bunch of Jews
in WWII. This guy grows up, this person who has been rescued, and
makes a documentary, and he interviews people in the village about
what made them do what they did. What is so amazingand you
see this with all rescuers, people who actually put their lives
on the lineis that they just look at the person asking the
question like, “Huh? What do you mean why did I do it? What else
was I going to do?” So what is extraordinary about these people
is that it is not actually experienced as a big decision. It’s totally
intuitive. The question though still is, “How do you get that first
order predisposition or climate?” But, it’s complicated.

RB: No one would say they were for genocide,
most people would say they would support measures to do something
about genocide and yet

SP: but yeah that was the puzzle. It
was never between "Never Again” and “Again and Again.” It was
people’s self-identity would be so tied up in the idea that they
would behave in a certain way when confronted with genocide. That
sort of begs the question, “What do they mean by genocide? How do
they recognize it?” There is a lot of wiggle room even on the epistemological
side, but the main wiggle is in rationalization. There is rationalization
about the nature of the violence on the ground, and then there is
rationalization about what one person as an individual can do when
confronted with all the systemic obstacles.

RB: What is also challenging here is that
Lemkin creates the word genocide, the UN codifies it and then 40
or 50 years later you quote an exchange between a reporter and the
State Department spokesman where the question is asked, “How many
acts of genocide make a genocide?” and

SP: As they do the genocide jig, as
they dance away from it

RB: perhaps more interesting than the
legal definition is what scale of terror and criminality measures
gross human rights violations, war crimes and genocide. We can accept
human rights abuse because that’s what happens in conflicts, but
once genocide is pronounced then all humanity is obliged to act?

SP: I don’t think there is one being established.
We don’t do much about the top and we don’t do much about crimes
against humanity. I don’t think there is much of a scale.

RB: Is it your feeling that the intentional
failure to identify genocide came from a need to avoid a moral obligation.
That is, if we acknowledge genocide taking place then all people
of conscience are obliged to act.

SP: Yeah, but I also think there is a moral
obligation to do something about gross human rights violations.
I may be in less cluttered company around gross human rights violations
than I am around systematic destruction of peoples. I don’t think
there are people who would say they are for human rights violations
either. And indeed I think, when polled, people would say we should
take measures to stop human rights abuse. But there is a political
cachet or rightness around genocide. There is the raw numbers issue,
which is there are more dead people. And my point here is: if we
are not doing anything about this, you can imagine what we are doing
about the lesser crimes. (By lesser, I just mean lesser in terms
of numbers). It’s a little disingenuous because we are more proneas
a government, not as a peopleto tackle arrests of journalists
and lower-scale human rights abuse than they are genocide. The fear
with genocide is the minute you engage, you are going to get dragged
in to do the real deal, to send in troops and to taking serious
and political and military risks. Our government is capable of being
more responsive to wide-spread arrests of political prisoners, to
torture and things like that, that they will engage diplomatically.
What’s amazing about genocide is that not that we don’t send in
out troopswhich is disappointing to mewe don’t do anything.
Except for Bosnia. There is no denunciation, no economic sanctions,
no use of technology to jam hate radio or tools being used to propagate
hate. There is an all-system shutdown. Where lesser human rights
abuses are prone to generate something. My prescription would be
that the level of American and international engagement would ratchet
up commensurate with the abuse on the ground. So you have human
rights abuses, you are playing, you are engaging diplomatically
from the low to the high level. You are thinking about economic
sanctions. You start to see ethnic cleansing, same thing, you are
in there, and then when you move into the zone and you start to
see systematic murder and deportation and rape, it’s not like it’s
an on/off switch. You are getting ever more alarmed and deploying
ever more resources. Eventually, militarily, if you are in that
situation.

RB: You introduce Hirshman’s categories of
futility, perversity and jeopardy in reviewing American response
to genocide. His was not specifically theory about genocide?

SP: This is again my wildly innocent and
vaguely illiterate self: Stumbling upon theories long after I identified
these patterns and suddenly I would read a book where somebody says,
“And by the way there is a theory for this.” In this case it was
Albert Hirshman, whose entire corpus I went on to read because he
is a genius. He wrote this book called The Rhetoric of Reaction
about social justice and the variety of ways in that we (our government)
talk ourselves into believing that nothing useful can be done to
make the world a better place. If you think about welfare, instituting
some kind of ambitious welfare or social security, the response
of everyone is, “What good will it do? People who don’t want to
work are not going to work. Put them on the payroll and it will
have perverse consequences because they will become even lazier.”
Or, “If we do it, okay, it will make work for this select group
but you jeopardize what you already have.” Your health care program
or your this or your that. This book was recommended to me as I
was describing to somebody some of the patterns I saw. I didn’t
have the handy dandy phrases to describe what I was seeing. He also
wrote a book called Exit Voice Loyalty, which was helpful
in thinking about why nobody ever resigns on the basis of grappling
with this dissonance between their self-identity and governmental
policy. Of course, the Bosnia case is the exception [a number of
foreign service officers resigned].

RB: When you started the book were you writing
a history, a legal brief, a broadside?

SP:
I don’t really know. A history, I suppose. The editor who boughtit
was originally bought by Random Housewhen I finished the first
draft of the book, it was a little longer than it is now. It wasn’t
as tight but it was a good book

RB: you should be proudit’s a
good and important book. It should have a long and significant life

SP: I hope so, but somebody didn’t think
so. I wrote this history and the original person who bought it,
I think, expected a broadside and basically dropped the book. He
wanted a polemic and personal account. I said, “People don’t know
the history. There are two ways to do this. You can tell people
that it’s bad to allow genocide or you can show people how we allow
genocide again and again. And I know how to do both and this way
is the better way.” I am now speaking more confidently than I did
at the time. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had an instinct
that this was the right way. I thought, “I want to reach as many
people as possible. Maybe he’s right.” But I knew that this was
readable, and I had people who were not in the genocide or human
rights business who were loving the book and finding it a page turner.
I felt like he was really wrongor I hoped that he was wrong.
So I found another publisher, finally. Really, it was rejected by
practically every house in New York. Then Basic Books took a chance
on it. I managed to convinceactually it didn’t take muchMike
Kelley was interested at The Atlantic Monthly in having me
do a magazine version of the Rwanda story.

RB: Is that the article that won the Atlantic
a National Magazine Award?

SP: Yeah.

RB: That raises your stock, doesn’t it?

SP: One would hope, but boy

RB: so there was your Rwanda article
[September 2001] . Just this week there is an article in the New
Yorker [Joseph Leylveld, May 27, 2002] on the Milosevic trial
at the Hague. A month or so ago there was a piece on the gassing
of the Kurds in Iraq, again in the New Yorker [Jeffrey Goldberg,
March 25, 2002] and recently 60 Minutes had a piece on Dr.
Christine Godsen and the after effects of the gassing of the Kurds.
Is there is more attention being paid to such abuses?

SP: The Iraqi thing is sui generis.
It has to do with this administration’s designs. That has to be
considered apart from some of the other things that one could mention
like

RB: I don’t follow that. What has that
got to do with the fact that CBS and the New Yorker decided
that these were newsworthy stories?

SP: Because there is a real relationship
of what people’s sense is newsworthy and what the U.S. Government’s
policy is going to be.

RB: I’m shocked.

SP: Shock! Shock! I think there is a greater
ripeness to talk about Iraq than there ever was, certainly than
when the atrocities were being carried out in the 80s. 60
Minutes, to its credit, has done something on Godsen before.
Regarding Iraq, there was a ripeness to talk about Saddam because
he was and remained an enemy from ’91 on. The accountability thing
has some traction. [But] It took a trial of the enormity of the
Milosevic trial to get New Yorker coverage. I pitched them
on the Arusha tribunal and Rwanda and they weren’t interested.

RB: They weren’t interested?

You can’t have reliable partners in a war on terrorism if they are torturing and killing their own people.

SP: I can’t tell what
was me and what was the subject. But I think it was largely the
subject. The New Yorker is very hard to write for, but the
subject was very hard to sell. It’s [genocide awareness] is in the
air a bit.

RB: A bit?

SP: 9/11 it really cuts both ways. I’m
really seeing it in the response to my book.

RB: Which is what?

SP: On the one hand, there is a greater public
receptivity to foreign-policy stories and even those that implicate
justice issues and not just security issues. On the other hand,
it all feels kind of off-point. When you have in the news talk of
nuclear attacks and major biological and chemical attacks on this
country. I’m having a hard time getting any sense of policy or political
traction around this subject. For all the critical acclaimI’ve
been very luckybut not terribly good sales at all. If you
are not in it for the artistic agenda or the character-development
agenda but actually in it to change policy, you really need it to
be championed in an important placea subject like this. What
the Bush administration has shown by un-signing the International
Criminal Court Treaty, by its general disregard for multi-lateralism
and the United Nations and for addressing potential causesnot
just symptomsthis isn’t going to rank very high. They say
that genocide is different. But again, they have this on/off switch.
They haven’t learned the real lesson of Saddam. Which is, you have
to know who your partners are. You can’t have reliable partners
in a war on terrorism if they are torturing and killing their own
people.

RB: Pakistan

SP: Uzbekistan, Pakistan, you name
it. We are back to a Cold War set of tactical alliances. The lesson
of the bookif there is oneleaving aside the issue of
genocide, is that doing deals with devils means setting the stage
for policies that are going to bite you later. And we do get bitten.
We got bitten with our alliance with Saddam, we got bitten by ignoring
the destruction of the Bosnians. Bin Laden got in there, traveled
on a Bosnian passport. That kind of thing is going to happen. The
real lesson, looking back on the century, is that you don’t actually
know where the seeds of resentment, indeed aggression, towards the
United States are going to be planted. Which is why you would really
need to think systemically about an overhaul of US foreign policy.
Or at least a more long-term approach.

RB: So in addition to the moral imperatives
of responding to genocide there is the enlightened self-interest
aspect. I’m wondering what your model/example is for a book that
has significantly altered public policy in the last twenty years?

SP: Oh god, that’s a very good question.

RB: Any of those booksand I am sure
there are some, though I haven’t given it much thoughtsuch
books are groundbreaking and paradigmatic and cut their own path,
so who knows?

SP: Who knows? That’s right.

RB: So, cheer up.

SP: Cheer up. Exactly. It’s an excellent
question as to what the models are. Robert Kaplan’s books have had
profound and very negative influence on the thinking of policymakers.
You are right, one has to think long term. I imagine that Peter
Hoffkirk’s work and some of the stuff on jihad and Central Asia.
I have some colleagues here whose work has finally gotten the attention
that it long deserved. Part of this work is having done it and then
waiting for the world to orient itself around it.

RB: When I tell people what I have been reading,
the word ‘genocide’ certainly stimulates a glazed, almost pained
look, “Oh.” It seems to be a conversation stopper.

SP: That’s true. That’s why I was so quick
to say that the book is much more about American foreign policy.
I want there to be a public splash around the book. The systemic
effect that you are describing will come, if it comes. I can hope
that it comes, and this book will have a shelf life, I certainly
agree. But the more people read this book and the more there is
a sense of snob factor around having this book even if they don’t
read it, the moreapart from whether a president says, “I believe
in the moral argument and in the enlightened self-interest argument.”that
they will in the spirit of covering their asses want to not end
up in a book like this, someday. If the book languishes in libraries
and is read by graduate students that’s great. But what it won’t
do is have its own footstep effect for officials within the government.
Either because moral discourse is unfashionable or because enlightened
self-interest is a long-term proposition and therefore hard to get
a short-term institution like the Congress or the Executive to mobilize
around. There could just be that, “I don’t want to go down as the
person who allowed that or who shut it down.” And indeed, one of the
lessons of the book is a doable one even when we are fighting a
war on terrorism, which is: don’t make our response all or nothing.
Let’s open up the tool kit and think about the things that are relatively
cost-free to us.

RB: Like the instance you cite in Rwanda
where a phone call to a hotel seems to have saved some lives

SP: Exactly. So that’s why I want people
to read it.

RB: Has anyone taken exception to your thesis
that, in fact, U.S. policy succeeded, that it is one of non-engagement?

SP:
Not to my knowledge. I’m sure there are people out there grumbling
about the book. It’s hard because the record is so overwhelming.
People who know government know that I am right about that, in that
if you don’t lead on genocide, if the president doesn’t say it’s
a priority and make public speeches and do contingency military
planning, then the inertia and the denial and the costs prevail.
Inevitably it’s over-determined. Throw in the journalists and the
public and all the other people who aren’t drawing attention tomy
major criticisms come from the Chomsky Leftpeople who criticize
me, “I’m surprised that you are surprised. How could you write about
America allowing genocide when America commits genocide? How could
you think the Americans could ever do any good?” I say look, “Where
we differ is that I take the system as it is and I agree that there
is a serious postmodern demolition of the system that can be doneit
just isn’t mine and you have done it. Frankly, it hasn’t done any
good as far as I can tell. It might make us a little more sensitive
to power structures and so on. But the system is what it is."

RB: What is the Chomskyite definition of
genocide that would apply to America in the 20th century?

SP: I would think Vietnam, if you look at
the genocide conventionI don’t know. Broadly speaking, they
are saying America’s hands are soiled, that’s the story of the 20th
century. But my point is that the system is what it is and you can
hope for enlightened leadership and hope for presidential epiphany
or the long term strategic approach. Or you can acknowledge that
system is structured in this fashion and it does work and is responsive
to political constituencies who are loud and can create the impression
of cost. Ultimately it’s not just a book about failure. You see
why the tribunals came into being. You can see why we got the intervention
in Bosnia. It’s because people took the system as fixed and worked
within it. I am all for changing the system and having a United
Nations that has a mind and a bank account and an army of its own,
but we are not close to that happening. In the meantime, I don’t
want the Burundians to die. I’m not sure what people on the left
would do about the Burundians.

RB: I thought it was significant, as you
pointed out, that prior to the Gulf War and other engagements, when
polled, Americans are against engagement or intervention. But once
the President commits there is a rally-around-the-flag effect. Why
is there a political cost, other than in Somalia?

SP: Well, it’s pretty big. “Vietmalia” they
call it now. There is no gain in doing the right thing. The lesson
of Kosovo and Somalia. You don’t get any extra credit for doing
the right thing. There is a rally-around-the-flag effect, but one
of the theories in Washingtonit’s untested, I thinkis
that if the intervention is one predicated on humanitarian ends
rather than hardcore security, if it’s soft and fluffy and about
moral things, you will have a rally-around-the-flag effect but the
minute you start taking casualties you will have a commensurate,
for every hundred casualties, dropping of support. And that one
lesson of the last century is that foreign policy loses you votes
and political capital. Terrorism is one of the few instancesand
it was less Bush’s response and more our being attacked that caused
us to close ranks. So I think it’s that you do the right thing and
you get whacked. You do nothing and there is no cost. You do the
right thing and it goes wrong and there is significant cost. So,
remind me why this is a good idea from a political standpoint? It’s
up to us on the outsidewe are going to be a long time in mobilizing
this constituencyI think there is more hope in the shame factor.
Which is why my ambition for the book is so unrealistic. There is
more hope in individuals being afraid reputationally, then there
is in real-time political mobilization around an ongoing genocide.
See what I mean?

RB: I do. I don’t know why you think that?
Because Clinton and Bush will be so concerned about their legacies?

SP: I’m not saying there is a lot of hope.
I’m just saying there is more hope in that than imagining progressives
who are not good at mobilizing domestic constituencies around humanitarian
subjects are not very good at lead advocacy. I wasn’t saying there
was great hope, just more hope in a simpler accountability expo
strategy than in a real-time mobilization strategy.

RB: You quote David Rieff’s interpretation
of “Never again.” (Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of
the West) which is

SP: “Never again will Germans kill Jews in
the 1940s in Europe.”

RB: I take that to be the ultimate deflation
of that pompous and sanctimonious slogan. They don’t really mean
it.

SP: I think what they mean is that never
again should genocide happen. Wouldn’t it be nice

RB: yeah wouldn’t it be nice (both
laugh). Does it seem like Americans aren’t interested in foreign
policy and that in essence it will always be conducted and formulated
by an elite? If you go to Fargo, North Dakota, people don’t talk
about it unless it involves grain subsidies.

If I hear one more time that this is a man who was gassing his own people, Im going to jump off a building. Yes, he was, and we were giving him a billion dollars a year while he was doing it, as a matter of fact!

SP: Having just been
on a 20-city book tour I think people want to talk about it, it’s
just they don’t think they have much specialized knowledge and they
won’t pick up the phone about it. There is this new ripeness to
talk about it and to understand “why they hate us.” And there has
always been a willingness to talk about the Holocaust. It’s a quirky
thing that we will remember various aspects of our foreign-policy
history. There is a disconnect. The public is more prone to think
in terms of values and morality, but the elites think both on behalf
of the publicthey use the public as an alibiand because
of their own lingua franca and interests, they think only of security
and economic prosperity. So values are really going to get left
out of foreign policy. The problem now is that by leaving values
out of foreign policy we are making ourselves such a target. In
America people are going to feel that. There is some chance that
only that would wake us out of our slumber.

RB: Certainly statements by leadership contain
ethical concerns

SP: The trim is moral

RB: Which is a reflection, you believe, of
the concerns of the public?

SP: Which they know works but the motivation
is short term and almost nothing to do with morality.

RB: Essentially, realpolitik.

SP: That’s why we were talking about Iraq.
If I hear one more time that this is a man who was gassing his own
people, I’m going to jump off a building. Yes, he was, and we were
giving him a billion dollars a year while he was doing it, as a
matter of fact! That sells, Christine Gosden sells. But it didn’t
sell enough to motivate the government.

RB: Anything you learned from your tour?

SP: I committed myself a long time ago that
if I could get satisfied with the quality of the book that I would
become like Lemkin and try to do something about it. I felt like
there were stories in there that could captivate people and that
that was the way in, to have a conversation about some of these
people. Talking about genocide is harder, you deal with the glazed-eye
effect. It was grueling and degrading, to be doing three or four
things a day. There was a definite ripeness in some surprising places
like in Boise. The city leaders came out en masse. There
was a hunger to have a conversation. In other places, disappointing,
six people in Nelson Mandela t-shirts.

RB: I won’t ask where that was. You do make
the point that silence is frequently mistaken for indifference.

SP: It holds genocide to a higher standard.
There is very rarely a bottom-up demand for anything in foreign
policy. The only time you will get it is to get the US out of places
rather to get them in. Even if the book became a best seller you
would still need a mechanism to mobilize people. Look, two million
people go through the Holocaust museum every year. We have a real
challenge on our hands in terms of mobilization. But the first thing
is get an awareness and a sense of shame out there. And a sense
of dissonance to debunk the consensus around “Never again!” Very
few people have reflected on it the way Rieff did. For most people
it’s a soothing forward-looking narrative. So the first thing is
to say, “Hey, by the way, we haven’t done enough.” So that the next
time something happens, you say, “Oh gosh, this is like that thing
that we always let happen.” Rather than say, “This isn’t like the
Holocaust in x or y ways.” We’ll see. It’s going to be a long haul.

RB: Is this, making people pay attention
to the lack of response to human rights abuses, a life-long project
for you?

SP: I think so. I’m looking for help. What
I’m going to contribute, I hope, again and again, is the capacity
to bring the acts on the ground together with the policy story with
a kind of human narrative. There are people who are a lot better
than me, at mobilizing constituencies around an issue like this.
That may sound like a cop out. I’m thinking of my next projectin
the near term it won’t be on genocideit will be on AIDS. So
I think I will always be drawn to the worst things. The worst things
that we take as background conditions that later seem obvious. The
question at the heart of this book is an obvious one. And the question
of how Membeke could have the policy he has had on AIDS for 5 years
is a question in the back of everyone’s mind. There are a lot of
logical problems with making AIDS number one, but the human cost
is so enormous against that absence of leadership that again you
have the same kind of puzzle. There are logical reasons with illogical
consequences and distinctly immoral consequences.